Car Tech

Take the religious following of air-cooled Porsche 911s, then reduce that to the community of folks who are evangelists for the four-cylinder 912, and you've got a group of seriously passionate people. Like most passionate people that I've met, they want to bring you into the fold and show you why whatever it is they love deserves attention.

"Is engine braking with a manual transmission bad?" you might ask your disinterested friends at lunch. Well, Engineering Explained has an answer for you! In his newest video, Jason Fenske goes over not only what engine braking is, but also whether or not it's bad for your car.

Waymo, the self-driving car company spun off of Google's parent company Alphabet in 2016, scored a major win earlier this month when a federal appeals court ordered Uber to hand over secret documentation related to the two company's ongoing legal battle.

After revealing its hydrogen energy plan last week, the South Australian government has already signed up a potential manufacturer for its fleet of renewables-powered buses: Navya, a French company that specialises not only in electric vehicles, by autonomous ones too.

In March, The New York Times revealed that Uber was evading and deceiving law enforcement officials in a number of cities through an internal software program called Greyball. The program goes to alarming lengths of surveillance to sidestep regulators, and an investigation by the city of Portland reveals how it was used to circumvent government officials there.

Image Cache: The Goodwood Revival, counterpart to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, is all about vintage cars, as its name describes. Held over the course of three days at the Goodwood Circuit instead of on Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond's driveway, the Revival brings the iconic race cars of the 1920s through the 1960s together and back to life. They aren't just sitting there all pretty, either. They are going toe-to-toe on the racetrack. It's like being yanked back in time.

The Takata airbag recall is the largest automotive safety recall in history. It's almost guaranteed that either you or somebody you know has owned or once owned a car with a Takata airbag inflator. Here's a video that explains what's so dangerous about them, and why it should terrify you.

Video: Honda's first ever Australian brand commercial, which quietly launched a couple of weeks ago, is wonderful. It shows off the company's suite of technology — from cars to robots to racing boats to the HondaJet — and it does it in a way that makes me want them all.

The morning commute across Manhattan on Thursday was a typical-as-of-late snarl of bottlenecks and delays, with debris of unknown origins causing an oppressive backup of the city's subway system. It was the latest in a string of examples of the deteriorating, century-old system, another sign of the significant level of investment that's needed to bring the subway up to 21st century standards and efficiency.

Though it was an otherwise unsurprising morning, I'm mentioning it because, several hundred miles away, as New Yorkers endured another annoying trek around town through a system of the past, a theoretical, futuristic solution to public transit woes in the U.S. — the Hyperloop — took another small-step toward coming to fruition. But, alluring as it is, the vacuum transit system remains a long-shot — even with 10 possible routes now on the table.

When we think of a car being wrecked so badly that it's effectively totaled, we tend to imagine pretty gruesome, mangled wrecks. What we don't usually picture is an incident that left damage so small you could hide it with your thumb, but that's exactly what happened to one deeply unlucky Corvette.

100,000 Volkswagen, Audi and Skoda cars in Australia are affected by the company's 'cheat software', the dual-mode switch that detected emissions testing conditions and changed vehicles' performance to create lower emissions. Two open class action lawsuits are underway, and a Federal Court judge has ordered the manufacturer to explain on the stand exactly why the software was installed.

At first, it seemed to be a quirky prank — a man was driving around town dressed up like a car seat and convincing people his car had no one at the wheel. Then we learned that it was all a shadowy research project by Virginia Tech. And now we know that Ford was behind the whole thing and it's all for science.

Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out of Google, just scored a major win in its ongoing legal battle against Uber. Waymo is suing the ride-hailing company, claiming that a former Waymo employee stole trade secrets about its autonomous vehicle technology and took them to Uber, where Uber then incorporated them into its own cars.

On Tuesday, US Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao revealed the updated version of the guidelines for the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles. The DOT secretary defended the guidelines, which opt for voluntary guidance rather than enforceable rules. Chao said that a third version is in progress and slated to be introduced in 2018.

China has announced plans to end sales of all fossil fuel-powered cars. Bloomberg reports that Xin Guobin, vice-minister of the Industry and Information Technology Ministry, is finalising a timetable for ending production and sales of petrol-powered cars while stepping up incentives for hybrid and electric cars, though no exact deadline has been announced. China has long pushed for electric cars (called "New Energy Vehicles" in the country), introducing tax breaks for new buyers and planning 100,000 new charging stations in 2017 alone.

I once sat around a table with senior brass from Audi and was laughed at for asking if the brand would ever introduce a drift mode like many of its rivals. Well now rumours and teases indicate Audi will instead offer an R8 that's always in drift mode with a rear-wheel drive model. Who's laughing now?

BMW has been in a weird place concerning design for a while, perhaps even decades, now. The main issue seems to be the company not being too sure how to adapt its classic kidney grille design to increasingly large vehicles. All of that has culminated in the new X7 SUV concept, which is borderline horrendous.

"More than 100 Australians are killed in car crashes every month and the same number are seriously injured every day, so the significance of this problem cannot be over-stated," says Australian Automobile Association Chief Executive Michael Bradley.

It is not only the cost in life that has been revealed by the AAA's latest report - road crashes cost the Australian economy almost $30 billion annually, and the AAA is urging for a raft of federal policy interventions it says are urgently needed to reduce deaths and injury.